Baroque
The first Western artists active in Brazil were Roman Catholic priests who came from Portugal to “civilize” the Indians. Jesuits assumed an important role in this process, with their many missionary establishments called "Reductions" teaching religion through art in the form of sacred plays, music, statuary, and painting. José de Anchieta was the first important playwright; Agostinho de Jesus and Agostinho da Piedade produced the first known sculptures; Belchior Paulo, João Felipe Bettendorff, Ricardo do Pilar, and a few others did the first paintings; while Francisco de Vaccas and Pedro da Fonseca started organizing the musical life of the infant colony. Basílio da Gama and Gregório de Mattos were the first secular poets. All of them worked under the influence of the Baroque, the dominant style in Brazil until the early 19th century.
Through the 17th and 18th centuries Baroque art flourished with increasing richness and craftsmanship, mainly in Bahia and Pernambuco along the coast and in some inland regions, reaching the highest levels of originality in Minas Gerais, where a gold rush nurtured a rich and cultured local society. In Minas lived the greatest artists of Brazilian Baroque: painter Manuel da Costa Ataíde and sculptor-architect Aleijadinho. Minas was also the birthplace of a proto-Neoclassical school of music and literature, with composers Lobo de Mesquita and Francisco Gomes da Rocha, and poets Tomás Antônio Gonzaga and Cláudio Manuel da Costa.
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José Joaquim da Rocha: Painted ceiling of St. Dominicus Church, Salvador
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Ricardo do Pilar: Man of sorrows, c. 1690
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São Francisco Church, Salvador
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João Nepomuceno Correia e Castro: Immaculate Conception. Museu da Inconfidência
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School of Bahia: Christ the Savior.
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Ataíde: Our Lady surrounded by musician angels, Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, Ouro Preto
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Aleijadinho and Francisco de Lima Cerqueira: Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, Ouro Preto
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Aleijadinho: Christ praying, Bom Jesus de Matosinhos Sanctuary
Read more about this topic: Brazilian Art
Famous quotes containing the word baroque:
“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)